Resumen de The information in general purpose language dictionaries

María Paz Battaner Arias, Victòria Alsina Keith, Janet Ann DeCesaris

• This paper summarizes a research project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education (PB96-0305) on the information present in general purpose language dictionaries. We found that both monolingual and bilingual dictionaries were weak on pragmatic information concerning use. Entries in bilingual dictionaries were frequently not well organized in terms of order of equivalents or sense distinctions from a bilingual perspective, thus resulting in needless repetition of the same equivalent. Electronic editions of dictionaries were used to study the lexical semantics of specific affixes (the verbal prefix re- and the adjective suffix -oso), and their use was critical in establishing the semantics of the affixes. Finally, the paper discusses the representation of animal names in Spanish dictionaries and the role of encyclopedic knowledge in the definitions of these nouns.